Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
their way out of town. The train is the better option for Bologna (€4.40, 30 to 50 minutes,
half-hourly) and Ravenna (€6.20, 1¼ hours, 14 daily).
Most traffic is banned from the city centre. Overnight parking (€3 per 24 hours) is
available at a large car park off Via Darsena (just outside the
centro storico
).
Get in the saddle and join the hundreds of other pedallers in one of Italy's most cycle-
friendly cities. Many places, such as
Romanelli
(Via Aldighieri 28a;
9.30am-12.30pm &
3.15-7pm)
, rent bikes (per day €7 to €10).
Ravenna
POP 160,000
Stray a few blocks from its diminutive train station and Ravenna feels immediately differ-
ent, even by multilayered Italian standards. Historically it fills a little-known void
between the fall of the Roman Empire and the advent of the High Middle Ages, an era
when the Ravennese were enjoying a protracted golden age while the rest of the Italian
peninsula flailed in the wake of Barbarian invasions. Between 402 and 476 Ravenna was
briefly capital of the Western Roman Empire and a fertile art studio for skilled Byzantine
craftsmen, who left their blindingly colourful mosaics all over the terracotta-bricked
Christian churches.
No matter how impervious you might have become to zealous religious art, Ravenna's
brilliant 4th- to 6th-century gold, emerald and sapphire masterpieces will leave you strug-
gling for adjectives. A suitably impressed Dante once described them as a 'symphony of
colour' and spent the last few years of his life admiring them. Romantic toff Lord Byron
added further weight to Ravenna's literary credentials when he spent a couple of years
here before decamping to Greece. In 1996 the mosaics were listed as Unesco World Herit-
age Sites.
